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User blog:Thetivec/Making a Let's Play series
Hello everyone! I thought I'd give you a little bit of insight on how to make your own Let's Play series for Mount and Blade (or, really any game that you like). Back in January I posted my first video playing Dwarf Fortress. Let me tell you how this first recording went in my own opinion: Not well at all. I needed about five or more tries to get the introduction right. The first time I got the intro right, I kept on babbling for a while and then realized that I wasn't recording at all. Back to the start, and keep trying to do the intro. It got better though. A few episodes in I started getting the introduction right and everything started getting a bit more of a natural flow to it. Now I just hit record, and go "hello guys...." and take it from there. When I started the Let's Play of Mount and Blade: Warband, I was warm enough in my shoes and did not stutter too much. Each episode is a learning experience, and there's almost always something for me to read up on for the next episode. So, what do you need to make a Let's Play series? *Time *Fraps or a similar screen recording software *Lots of hard drive space *A video editing program *A YouTube account and (optional) a fast connection. Let's start from the top with "time". You have to invest a lot of time in front of the computer. It takes me about an hour to record that much material, since I usually don't pause mid-recording. Now, that is not the end of the episode. I have to encode the video into a decent sized file before even thinking about doing anything else. This may take as long as an hour per episode, even more depending on your quality settings. Recording is done using Fraps. I have tested every other screen recording software, and none of them give better results than Fraps in my opinion. Some of them might encode on the fly, or do multi-channel sound, but I don't need this. I highly recommend Fraps, it is very advanced and gives a very good result. At a tradeoff. Fraps saves the output in very very high quality. It doesn't do any encoding, it just saves it into huge chunks on your drive. A single episode, 60 minutes long, will take up 100Gb or more depending on the video window size. My window is 1920x1080 (actually 1008 high due to window titles from running the game in windowed mode), so it usually ends up near 200Gb Then you have to join and encode the video files into a single AVI (or whichever format you want). I've been using AVS Video Editor for this, but I am slowly learning how to use VirtualDub for the job. I've run tests on both, and VirtualDub give me more options on the codecs that I use (H.264). Once you've encoded the video, fire up your favorite browser and log on to your YouTube account. This is where the fun part starts. Depending on your file size and internet connection, you will spend a LOT of time uploading. I've only got a very slow ADSL line, so my upload speed is between 60Kb and 80Kb per second. I frequently see: "Estimated time: 680 minutes" in the YouTube uploader. After the upload is completed, all you need to do is attract viewers and subscribers. This is probably the hardest part - I'll have to get back to you once I figure it out ;) I will be uploading a new episode of Ulfar's Tale soon, so stay tuned for Episode 15! - TheTivec Category:Blog posts